The Academy of Ancient Music’s project to record all of Handel’s works with opus numbers reaches its completion with this double-bill of 13 trio sonatas. Most are played by two violins (Pavlo Beznosiuk and Rodolfo Richter) and basso continuo (Joseph Crouch and Richard Egarr). The Op 2 set, first published in about 1730-31 by John Walsh senior using a fake title-page of an Amsterdam publisher, features two sonatas that specify slightly different scoring: flute in HWV386 and recorder in HWV389 (both played by Rachel Brown). Handel might not have had much to do with Walsh’s venture but he was certainly more involved in Walsh junior’s 1739 publication of Op 5, which features some of his finest chamber compositions.

The interplay between the AAM is Baroque chamber-playing of the very highest order: sincerely conversational, emotive and finely nuanced. Egarr and Crouch are an outstanding continuo team, providing attentive yet uncluttered support to the two upper instruments. Brown and Beznosiuk play together with touching eloquence in the Largo of HWV386 and excel in the jaunty jig that concludes HWV389 (erroneously listed in the booklet as an Adagio; documentation has not been the strongest aspect of this attractively packaged series). Beznosiuk and Richter interweave to gorgeous effect in the Largo of HWV387 (reputedly one of Handel’s earliest extant compositions). On a few occasions I wondered if the slower music could have been trusted to play itself with a more literal rhythmical pulse, and sometimes things seem precious if compared to the best alternative recordings (for example, the London Handel Players on Somm), but of course this may also be an unavoidable consequence of listening to an entire collection of works that were never designed by the composer to be sampled together in one long sitting. I particularly enjoyed the performances of the Op 5 set: the Gavotte from HWV396 is impeccably balanced like a first-class consort of voices, the contrasts in mood and sonority are ideally judged in the Musette of HWV397, and the Passacaglia in HWV399 is free-flowing and sensuous. The AAM’s marvellous music-making overrides Egarr’s soapbox dogmatic tendencies in his booklet-note.